Elon Musk is hot on the heels in the AI race.
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, is currently testing an independent iOS app in countries such as Australia, providing its chatbot Grok service. This app can access real-time data from the web and X. It has generative AI functions such as rewriting text, summarizing long paragraphs, answering some questions, and generating images based on text. xAI is also preparing to launch a dedicated Grok.com website so that users can access the chatbot on the web. At the same time, xAI has made the Grok – 2 model freely available to all users of the X platform.
xAI has just completed a Series C financing round of $6 billion, with 97 investors participating, including A16Z, BlackRock, Kingdom Holding (a Saudi conglomerate), Fidelity, Sequoia Capital, NVIDIA, and AMD. Reports suggest that only investors who supported xAI in previous financing rounds were allowed to participate in the Series C round. Investors who helped fund Musk’s acquisition of Twitter received up to 25% of xAI’s shares. The minimum investment in this round was only $77,593. After this round of financing, the company’s valuation has jumped to $50 billion, doubling compared to the previous financing round a few months ago. The total financing this year has reached $17 billion.
With the funds in hand, xAI’s official website reveals that its most powerful model to date, Grok 3, is currently in training and is seen as a competitor to OpenAI’s latest flagship model o3. According to previous revelations, it will be released by the end of this year. This financing will be used to further accelerate infrastructure, launch ground-breaking products that will be used by billions of people, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies to fulfill the company’s mission of “understanding the true nature of the universe.” The infrastructure investment here may refer to the multi-billion-dollar supercomputer site Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee, which is used to train its AI models. Colossus adopts NVIDIA’s full-stack reference design and is equipped with up to 100,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs and will soon be expanded to 200,000 GPUs. Colossus was fully operational in just 122 days and started running workloads just 19 days after the first batch of servers were delivered. Jim Fan, a senior research scientist at NVIDIA, highly praised Musk’s execution ability and provided an execution manual.
In contrast, OpenAI, Musk’s arch-rival, although it just completed a 12-day year-end promotion live stream, there are few highlights. The newly released Sora has also been criticized by early adopters, who claim that it is not as good as China’s Keling and Hailuo AI. GPT – 5 is also nowhere in sight. According to The Wall Street Journal, the research and development progress of OpenAI’s GPT – 5 is behind schedule and not going smoothly, and the gap between input and output is relatively large. OpenAI expects total losses (excluding equity compensation) from 2023 to 2028 to reach $44 billion. Most of its existing profit models have low profits and cannot keep up with the burning rate of funds.
Although starting a bit late, Musk is presenting不小的挑战 to “his former ally and now betrayer,” Sam Altman. As one of the initiators of OpenAI and being forced out halfway, Musk has ample motivation to catch up in the AI race.
In addition to the hotly pursued AI race, Musk’s other ventures are all in full swing. SpaceX’s latest valuation has reached $3500 billion, making it the largest unicorn enterprise in the world, an increase of 67% compared to before. Tesla’s second super factory in Shanghai is dedicated to producing energy storage batteries, Megapack. It is expected to be completed before the end of the year, and its construction speed is faster than that of the first super factory. Tesla’s financial results for the third quarter of 2024 show that the company has achieved steady growth in vehicle deliveries, profitability, and energy deployment. Its total revenue reached $25.2 billion, a year-on-year increase of 8%. Recently, Musk also posted 100 posts on X (formerly Twitter), criticizing a government budget bill previously reached by both parties. Eventually, the bill was vetoed, bringing the federal government close to a shutdown. Musk also earned the new title of “America’s shadow president.”
